I needn’t have worried about having enough turn up to the Okehampton handbell afternoon: 31 people were there ringing handbells!

In the last few days the worry was ‘will we have enough experienced ringers?’ as more and more novices signed up, or turned up on the day, but we...

Last Saturday, we sat down and rang a peal of Stedman Caters.

For many of our fellow handbell ringers whose attempts at ringing beyond a plain course are fraught with hesitations, disastrous memory failures, swapped pairs, and simple lack of confidence, the above is an amazing statement.  Most of...

Here we are less than three weeks off the Okehampton handbell afternoon. I’ve had it on the education programme since the start of the year, and in recent weeks sent emails to anyone in Devon I know of who rings handbells; as well as sending a poster out through branch...

One house, one day, three dozen ringers and a similar number of planned quarter peals.  That was the formula for the 2012 ODG Handbell Day, held in Reading Saturday.  It’s an annual event that has grown over the years.  The first one I attended, in 1987, was in a village...

My brother has recently eloped, and we have been trying to get a quarter peal round for the last couple of weeks. Our string of frustrations is a good way to encapsulate the progress of our ringing over the last few months.

(We have had a long period 'off-blog' in...

Handbells, and why more people don't ring them, has been a subject on the Change Ringers mailing list over the last couple of days.  The debate has been fairly lively, not yet very conclusive, and so probably far from over.

In the midst of this, Lester Yeo, from the Guild...

Andrew Craddock has added a fascinating new feature to PealBase: stage leaders. That is to say, the people who have rung the most peals at each stage (Minor, Triples, Major etc). At the time of writing, PealBase data goes back to 1952, so older peals are not included in...

Due to the mysterious (so our hosting company tells us) disappearance of the database, Learn to Ring Handbells will be down for a few more days while we completely reconstruct it.

In the meantime, take a look at our new website for the Mount Vernon Handbell Club.  We made...

I had forgotten how utterly nervewracking it is to ring with people watching.  The awareness of the audience puts me into this lightheaded state and suddenly it takes  massively more concentration to keep on the lines.

We were ringing, with Jonathan and Angela, for the Christmas Fayre at our local...

This morning we made a presentation about handbell ringing to our primary school, with the aim of getting some students interested in a handbell ringing club.  It was very brief, a short introduction to what this was (ringing by patterns) and wasn’t (tunes).

We got the headteacher to ring...